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Friday, January 11, 2019

The Spencer Davis Group, XTC, Eddy Grant and Tom Robinson bring you Trivial Fact of the Day

On their official Twitter feed today XTC revealed that they once bought the Spencer Davis Group's old PA.

XTC were formed in 1972, by which time the Winwood brothers had long parted from Spencer Davis. Perhaps they bought the PA after Davis had reformed the group for a couple of years in early Seventies.

This fact put me in mind of a story I once heard Tom Robinson tell on the radio. You can find it in an old Independent article:

He is happy to recall an incident from the first time he lost his place front of stage. "I was down to selling off my guitars and amplifiers. And when a musician sells off his instruments it's getting serious. Among the people who replied were two scruffily dressed rastas," he says.

"They were looking at the stuff in my garage and TRB was written on one of the flight cases. One of them says, 'Yeah, Tom Robinson, what happened to him? He was really good, man!'

So I said, 'Well actually, I am Tom Robinson.' And the guy said: 'Hey, you ought to keep at it, you know. People who keep at it always come back in the end.' So I said 'Sure, look at Eddy Grant.' And he replied, 'I am Eddy Grant.' "

The funny thing is that I remembered the story as being the other way round: Robinson buying Grant's PA when the latter's career was in decline.

That is something that could easily have happened in the late Seventies.